


The Norn's Tools in Another's Hands

by SofiaDragon



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Fat Thor, Frigga Lives (Marvel), Gen, Good Loki (Marvel), I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Implied/Referenced Torture, Loki Redemption (Marvel), Loki has a plan, Multiverse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, They aren't OK but they are working on it, Thor (Marvel) is Not Stupid, Thor (Marvel) is a Good Bro, Thor has a plan, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27521692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SofiaDragon/pseuds/SofiaDragon
Summary: The six stones balanced each other, acting like the weights on a loom to stabilize the fabric of reality. The threads of each of their powers were needed, and Thanos had destroyed them. It was little wonder the entire universe was rotting away - there was no real recovery happening even after five years. New growth was constantly smothered by new problems, and not just in New Asgard. The Guardians of the Galaxy reported the same on every world they visited. The strife caused by the sudden loss of half of all life - not just peoples but the living plants and animals they ate, the seeds held in grain stores, and the flora and fauna that kept ecosystems in balance with the space they inhabited - was causing more death, misery, and violence even now.orIf the creators of the MCU can just show us Old Man Rodgers and imply that Captain America made a parallel timeline that is the best of all possible worlds for himself then I can show you the brodinsons doing it for themselves too.
Relationships: Loki & Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 137





	The Norn's Tools in Another's Hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taaroko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taaroko/gifts), [iluxia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iluxia/gifts).



Thor had been too drunk out of his mind when it was said to him to remember who said it, but the words stuck with him for the best part of a year before his pickled brain finally spat out a reason for why they bothered him so much. He thought that he might be forgiven for being so slow since so many of their people had lost their faith after the events he could never be forgiven for, and with all the priestesses dead at Hela’s hand he couldn’t blame them. “The Norns are cruel and fickle sometimes, and in moments of anger scatter their tools into our hands instead of fulfilling their responsibilities.” It was meant as a criticism. Thor had abdicated all of his responsibility even as his broken people refused to take his crown officially. He was still King Thor, but he did nothing but drink and wallow in his own filth. He was a failure, and what further shame could there be in letting his appearance match the rot inside him? He’d been a self-indulgent, arrogant, greedy boy and had learned nothing from his trials.

Thor knew that Loki, as prone to spending lazy hours stuffing his face while watching a play as he had been when posing as Odin, had kept up with the work of being king and done a decent job of it. That was the main reason he was able to trust Loki as much as he did, since it was not until most everyone was dead and they were on the Satesman that Loki admitted to the torture and mind-altering magic that had been used on him. He’d been certain they would lose against Thanos from the moment he landed on Midgard with the mind stone singing in his brain, and aimed at making their last days as pleasurable and bountiful as possible. The people of Asgard had truly been happy under his rule, and the plenty that he unleashed from the treasury had started a baby boom. Loki’d hedged his bets and played all angles as he always had, of course, using their mother’s death as cause to have the defenses overhauled and improved. The evacuation that saved so few when Hela appeared had been based on plans Loki had dusted off and quietly distributed after millennia of complacency. His inward-focusing policies left their vassals and allies to take up the slack and some had even built up their military a bit to compensate for Asgard’s sudden shift in priorities. It wasn’t enough to fight against Thanos, even if Hela hadn’t popped up out of nowhere to destroy Loki’s plans, but then fighting Thanos hadn’t ever been his plan. Knowing that the tyrant would cull half the population Loki planned to have as many people fat, safe, and provisioned as possible to ensure their culture and species would survive.

Loki hadn’t really been that bad of a king, all things considered.

Thor was a terrible king, given that he’d almost immediately given up as soon as the battles were over, so the censure was certainly well-earned. Still, there were plenty of whispers about his deplorable state, so why would those words be anything special? It was while he was sitting listening to what was left of the heroes of Midgard talk about time travel and their one last shot at fixing things that it finally clicked. Thor was as sober as he had been in years, which still meant he stank of cheap alcohol but he’d come more than halfway from how he normally was, so perhaps that had something to do with it. Old lessons, things that Loki had enjoyed but Thor had suffered through and ignored as much as possible flitted through his mind. A pang of grief over the loss of their library hit him, followed swiftly by a sharper pain from the loss of the people who might have remembered enough to make up some of the difference. Lost history, lost technology, and lost faith choked him before the old lessons congealed into one indisputable fact. The Infinity Stones were the tools of the Norns.

While Tony was likely right about the mobius strip style of time travel they had access to now, the Time Stone had different rules. One could do things with infinity stones that were impossible, with no limitations beyond the strength of one’s will, the acceptance of any personal consequence, and the creativity of their imagination. The six stones balanced each other, acting like the weights on a loom to stabilize the fabric of reality. The threads of each of their powers were needed, and Thanos had destroyed them. It was little wonder the entire universe was rotting away - there was no real recovery happening even after five years. New growth was constantly smothered by new problems, and not just in New Asgard. The Guardians of the Galaxy reported the same on every world they visited. The strife caused by the sudden loss of half of all life - not just peoples but the living plants and animals they ate, the seeds held in grain stores, and the flora and fauna that kept ecosystems in balance with the space they inhabited - was causing more death, misery, and violence even now.

Thor kept these thoughts to himself. They collected the stones, fought a version of Thanos that was even more unhinged than before, and lost Tony when he performed a miracle with no pre-planning or support. Those among them whose spirits hadn’t been completely broken agreed that Steve would put all the stones back in their rightful places in time and space, and Thor stayed quiet about his doubts. Thor couldn’t afford to throw too many stones in his current state, but it seemed like the worst choice. Steve had never really felt at home in this century, and still refused to adapt in some troubling ways. Had Eir survived, she would likely have insisted Thor’s shield-brother spend some time being treated for war fetters, though she would have likely included tony and Thor and… all of them, really.

Thor didn’t really expect to see Steve again if they let him go through the time machine on his own. Not with how he’d handled the Accords and their aftermath - or not handled it at all. The one conversation he’d had with Captain America about what happened to the team while he was away ended with Steve shocked to his core upon finding out that Asgard’s treaties with other realms were mostly about regulations on ‘heroic acts’ and intervention when they weren’t about trade, even if in some cases they mostly boiled down to “if Odin approves it then it is legal, if he doesn’t it isn’t” with the Council of Elders weighing in after the fact. Steve’s assumption that Thor would settle the years-old argument in his favor highlighted that the man had never really learned how to live during peacetime and saw everything as an act of war requiring unilateral action to resolve. Tony had been too worn down by it all to gloat, cutting off the video call from his cabin with an accusation that Steve still didn’t know how the twenty-first century worked. Thor hadn’t been sober enough or in the right frame of mind to try to convince the Captain that he might need help moving on from his losses so soon after New Asgard was founded, and wasn’t sure he’d have the slightest chance of succeeding. Steve Rogers was obviously still a man displaced by war that hadn’t settled down, particularly since the man still had a photo of a dead woman who had married another and lived a full life without him in his pocket.

However, it would be hypocrisy of the highest level to accuse Captain America of planning to use time travel for his own selfish ends, considering that it looked like he’d just stolen the stones during his turn at watch to do the same thing. None of the others would listen to his whole plan, though. Thor used the time stone instead of Pim Particles to power the machine, which both let him use his inner seidr to help set the destination properly (he owed his brother at least a century of apologies for teasing him about using magic) and set the others around the platform to let him break all the rules. At least he hoped it would. If it created a bunch of branch realities and he ended up right back where he started when he went home then fuck it all; the knowledge that one version of reality existed was doing better than the mess he currently lived in would be enough. He’d just put it all back and none of the others would have to know what he’d done. Maybe some other, better-prepared version of him might go for the head first instead of center of mass. Ideally, it wouldn’t even go that far, but even that much improvement would be wonderful.

Having Tony use the stones had been nearly ideal. His mortal body couldn’t handle it, but his creative mind and incredible willpower were perfect. Bruce had the body and creativity, but lacked the willpower to punish the wicked or Thanos would not have been able to follow them forward in time. The traitor in their midst and all his scattered supporters across the universe should have been reduced to dust with Bruce’s snap. Thor was sure she would have been if it had been Tony doing it the first time, but Bruce didn’t seek to wipe out or otherwise punish Thanos’ remaining followers. He isn’t vengeful like that. Steve talked a lot about morality, saying that what Tony did proved that Tony was a good man in a way that rubbed Thor (and Jim and the young spider) the wrong way, but Thor thought that was secondary if relevant at all. It took a certain amount of ruthlessness and utilitarianism to do what Tony did and that was what Bruce lacked. Not that it was a bad thing, in some ways it made Bruce the better person, but it certainly made Tony the better leader. Being idealistically good and painting the universe in black and white had not served Thor well before Sakkar finally beat the last of it out of him, and he regretted all the things it caused him to overlook.

Thor thought that he knew how to split the difference, or rather he knew _who_ could do so. He appeared in a dark alcove. He was noticed almost immediately, but not by the guards. He knew Asgard’s defenses back to front and easily avoided the regular patrols. As soon as he snuck into his brother’s cell he felt an illusion conceal them. He took the punch Loki threw as his due.

“Tell me Loki, am I too late?” Loki’s jaw hung open for a moment as green eyes ran over Thor’s pudgy body. He had clean and properly-fitting clothes on at least, gifts from Pepper to try and get his head on straight and reduce his suffering from the outside in, all covered by a cloak woven of New Asgardian wool.

“What in Hel have you been doing?”

“Drinking until I can’t feel the guilt over not mentioning the change in your eye color to Mother before it was too late cracking my soul in two, among other regrets, and eating all of my other emotions.” The honest answer was met with a flurry of blinks from his otherwise frozen brother. That was his greatest tell, the techniques he used to cover over his wildly powerful emotions when he wanted to keep them to himself tended to leave him unnaturally still in whole or part. “Show me your true appearance, it is vitally important that I’ve gotten the date correct.”

“You are not so stupid as to meddle with time travel.” Loki was always quick like that, it would make some of this easier.

“As a first option? No, I’m not. As a last resort to prevent the fabric of reality from unwinding on its loom? Yes, I’m here to give you what you need to save the universe.” A burst of incredulous laughter dropped Loki backward into a chair.

“Give… me… to save… You think I want to be a hero? To accept your redemption and forgive all you have done to me? I’m a villain, born a monster and…”

“We were both raised by a monstrous creature, for all that we can’t stop loving the arrogant sack of lies. I can’t even be angry about it anymore, though he clearly thought we were both idiot pawns in his game.”

“No,” Loki said as he stood and picked up one of the many books piled in the corner. “I’ll not fall for whatever trick you think you are pulling.”

“Loki.”

“I want nothing from you.”

“Mother’s life is in danger. She’ll be dead by sundown if I have the date correct. We might not be able to save her, but I’d thought you’d want to try,” Loki froze halfway through turning a page.

“Talk.” Thor did. He told Loki of the aether, the Svaltelves, and Malicath. He left out no detail up to Loki’s apparent death. Given the horrors that he’d lived through, it was easy to talk about these petty troubles.

“You didn’t really die, and I am sorry that I was forced to leave you laying poisoned in that desolate place to stop Malicath from using the aether, but… the poison is fatal within seconds to any with Aesir or Vanir biology. Even knowing you were adopted, you had never seemed to be any different from us physically as far as medicine or poisons. I had no idea that for you it was only a paralytic that mimicked death and passed after an hour or so.” Loki glared at the mention of his origins, but his expression quickly softened around the eyes into pure determination. “You were free after that.”

“I can take the blow for her.”

“Or just keep the fight going an extra minute so Father and I can arrive. They fled like cowards when they saw him the first time. Even if you do not save her, though by the Norns I hope you can, there is another thing you must do, or else Thanos will use the stones in a way that starts unraveling the universe.” Loki jumped at the name of his torturer. “It will not require you to be in the same realm as the mad titan if it goes perfectly, and only briefly if it doesn’t, which is the most ingenious part of the entire plan. It only requires you to do what you do best.”

“And what is that, Thor? Lie and cheat?”

“Tell a story. Midgard has an amazing web of information built into it right now that will allow you to speak to all of its people and tell them of the true threat at the same time without interruption. Their greatest vulnerability is propaganda, and nearly all of Asgard’s history is more akin to fiction than fact from what I have seen since taking the throne. I’ve even made use of what Father has taught us of managing public opinion over the centuries to boost my own power, though unintentionally and at your expense. If you get Tony Stark’s attention and speak honestly to him of what happened to you he will cooperate; he is your best option. Do not underestimate him, he is like a powerful Jarl with vast plutocratic power and hundreds of thousands of employees, and he is the one who defeated Thanos once and for all even if it came too late. He has already made a power source resistant to the Infinity Stones and used it to power his heart - I’m not being poetic he has a medical problem with his heart, made a device that keeps his heart beating, and that is what the scepter hit when you tried to control his mind - but he will soon feel the need to properly repair himself because it steals too much of his breath. He saw what was on the other side of the portal and even now is working to create a proper defense against the incoming threat. Father would never listen, he set us up for Ragnarok and ruin so complete that I have to wonder if he did not care about my unsuitability for the throne because he knew I would not rule over anything more than rubble and ash for very long after his passing.”

“Ragnarok, and you expect me to believe you did not fight in that battle?”

“I did, and like Stark my victory came too late and at too great a cost. There were only about fifteen hundred of us left, and not one pregnancy in half a decade despite many making that a top priority. Listen, you have always loved plays and stories, you can do this and change everything. You will need this phone, it will let you record and edit a play or speech as carefully crafted as any of your illusions. It will not have all the functions it should because it is from the wrong time, but if you connect to the wifi you can upload whatever you record to YouTube, Twitter, and any other Social Media sources as you see fit. Those are the two big ones, though. Much of Midgard is addicted to checking them, and you were always good at making a dramatic entrance. You like sweets - coffee shops and dessert cafes tend to have free access to the internet with any purchase, so it won’t even be inconvenient.”

“Your brain is as rotted out as your body - you are talking nonsense.”

“Brother, this is all so far within your talents and outside of mine that while I took a couple years to get the hang of virtual forums and the battles of words one finds on Twitter and Fortnite, I would be shocked if it took you more than a week to become the top trending hash-tag on internet. Midgardian technology is different, not difficult. At least the technology used by the average people; Stark being something of a Jarl and a Master Smith are the least of his skills. If you show him this phone which he crafted with his own hands and tell him you know what is to come, he will know you speak the truth.”

“This is all nonsense! You said fifteen hundred. We are nearly twenty million strong. How could we be diminished so far? You said he came to Midgard and not Asgard!”

“In the same year Hela was freed from her prison, you brought a ship to evacuate the survivors while I distracted her with battle, we caused Ragnarok to kill her, and Thanos caught the ship. He killed half of those, then we were cut down by half again in the decimation.”

“The Goddess of Death is a myth.”

“She’s our older sister, she’s a necromancer driven insane by that corrupted magic, she tied her life and magic to the foundations of this realm so only its destruction can kill her as far as I know - the next time you want to shout at father please do bring that up, she desires the complete subjugation of the entire universe, and when Father dies she will reappear in the place he breathes his last because he used his own magic as the seal for her prison. So, you know, don’t stab him too deeply unless you are ready to evacuate the realm. Midgard was welcoming, but we were so few and arriving in the wake of the decimation they had bigger issues than fighting with us over a desire to settle on some unused patch of land near Tønsberg.”

“You want me to convince Midgard to let us colonize a part of their realm so that I can murder your Father just before I cause Ragnarok.”

“Well, unless you come up with a better plan. And you won’t have to murder him if you don’t want to, he’ll only live four more years or so, though grief over Mother’s passing might have sped that along. Maybe once you collect enough of the Infinity stones, which will practically gather themselves on Midgard as long as they aren’t deliberately sent elsewhere, there will be other options. That is my endgame: You, Stark, and Banner working together to use the infinity stones to strike Thanos from the face of the universe, ideally before he even reaches the Nine Realms. Holding a stone directly in your hand can destroy most anyone, but sharing the burden makes it more stable. The Guardians of The Galaxy were able to use the power stone bare-handed with all five of them working together. I’m sure you can come up with a better solution than one in each fist as you all stand with linked arms, but it isn’t necessarily going to kill you the way doing so killed Stark and deeply wounded the Hulk if you share the burden. Perhaps Carol Danvers or the Guardians of the Galaxy could assist as well, if you can contact them. Remember that name. Danvers is a mortal that absorbed so much of the Tesseract’s power that she has become a tool of the Norns herself, but her existence is a closely held secret. She was not called in to help by S.H.I.E.L.D. until after the Decimation due to some very poor decision making and the machinations of an ancient evil that infects that spy organization currently. Hydra may be a danger to you, if only because they want to conquer Midgard and will see you as competition.”

“The hydra? I thought it was a beast some of them worshiped, like the Easter Bunny.” Thor laughed, the first true laugh he’d had in years.

“Oh, brother, the Bunny is… a thing I will let you discover for yourself. I think you will find that entire business too enjoyable to participate in to spoil it for you. I will say that paganism was re-founded in what they call a New Age now that the uppity types have stopped burning people at the stake and there are some customs that will seem familiar to us among them if you want to fold that into your propaganda, though they are a tiny minority. The atheists like Stark are more likely to be useful, I think. Judging such things is more your specialty, and will rely on what exactly you plan to say and what the public is thinking that particular minute. But no, Hydra is not a beast or the figurehead of a religion, it is a clandestine order of evil-minded people with no honor who seek to achieve absolute power from the shadows by forcing conformity. You’ll hate them I’m sure, they seem categorically devoid of all humor and detest the arts as being too dangerously creative. One cannot control the way a population thinks unless they restrain the arts, by their measure.”

“I should have put the hydra-followers on the front lines.”

“You were trying to reduce casualties and ensure your own failure, and don’t even try to deny it.”

“I was conquering their realm!”

“Bullshit, you devised better battle tactics when your voice still squeaked. However you managed it, you took the only infinity stone in Thanos’ possession from him and even under its influence you threw the fight in spectacular fashion so he could not reclaim it. I don’t know why you haven’t told Mother - the healers could verify what happened to you.”

“We can’t stand against him, Thor. I can save Mother, and I can ensure that when the time comes there are as many of us as possible left, but we can not stop him.”

“We can. We did. It was too late, but it was done. I cut off his head with an ax forged by King Eitri, and we fought a victorious battle with the aid of the Avengers, the Gardians of the Galaxy, and the Midgardian Sorcerers. You won’t like them, their leader is too much of an arrogant asshole like yourself to get along with him well from the start.” Loki hissed through his teeth at Thor in offense, but didn’t interrupt. “I think he could grow on you. At least enough to work together, though the thought of a prank war or friendly rivalry between you gives me shivers. What must not happen is the destruction of the infinity stones.”

“The stones are the power sources that create our universe. They can’t be destroyed.”

“They can’t be destroyed without destroying the universe. It is much the same problem as Hela and Ragnarok. The Titan used the stones to destroy the stones after he obliterated half of all life in the universe so that the Decimation could not be undone, but without the stones reality is falling apart. Entropy creeps in from all sides and it will be a slow death. Midgard may not realize it for a few generations yet, and I don’t think it was part of Thanos’ plan, but I doubt the few children Asgard has left will make it to our age. Nothing is well, no magic is stable or true, and everything is dying.”

Loki sat in stunned silence. Thor watched as the horror of it all finally settled in and wished he wasn’t almost sober.

“I would tell you the whole story, but the attack will begin soon. I can not be seen here and I really must go back. The longer I am here the more strain I put on the fabric of reality, and since the point is to change things the things I know about from later won’t really be that useful.”

“Saving mother from the Dark Elves and securing the aether before it can be used by them is the first priority,” Loki said softly. His voice was hollow and his eyes stared out into the middle distance. “That will also lay a seed in the minds of many here that I may be redeemable, then I can disappear after the battle on Midgard in order to inform that realm that I was not the one who ordered the attack on their realm and seek out Stark - what is the proper formal address for him?”

“Er, he is a learned man in several fields. They have a level beyond Mastery where one has to break new ground and advance their collective knowledge which they call a P.H.D. Those who have achieved that level are addressed as Doctor and then their surname. It is Dr. Jane Foster or Dr. Foster, and never Dr. Jane, should you wish to practice on her before you have to perform for Tony. Healers also have that title, though I was always a little fuzzy on the specifics since it seemed that there was a different standard. Tony - Dr Stark - has forged several synthetic souls - some old fashioned house spirits of sorts among them - that can and will watch you from several angles when you are with him even when you are not in his house. Be polite to Jarvis, he’s the main one who runs things, and you will earn a lot of respect from both of them.”

“Mother, Dr Stark, infinity stones, Hela, and… him. Such a simple task you’ve set before me, to fix everything you broke.”

“I have brought it to you because I believe no other could do it. You simply doubted that it was possible the first time around, and you have been tortured and put through trials that would break any man down. I can’t blame you for it when I… became this shattered shadow of myself after far less personal pain. I just hope it helps to know that Father lied to me at least as much as he did to you, because while I am Mother’s first child he lied every time he called me his firstborn and I have this horrible theory in my head about who your birth mother might have been that I will never, ever be able verify one way or the other. It makes me want to learn enough necromancy to find out, chop him in half, bring him back to yell at him a while whether you are or aren’t my nephew, and then bring you back to have a turn or three stabbing him for good measure.”

“Why would you think I was born by the Goddess of Death?”

“Well the other option is that he had a hand in crafting your form when you settled into an Aesir body as a babe and made you look like her, and I don’t think that makes me any less pissed off about it.”

“Casting magic like that on an infant is just…” Loki trailed off.

“Aye, but that is where my opinion of him has dropped to. I’m absolutely certain that he threw you down here with no chance of anything better because he’s actually mixed the two of you up in his anger. What you did before you fell wasn’t actually that bad, and you were clearly more in need of a mind healer and a well-guarded trip to the countryside than this cell when you came back. You do look enough like a mix of Laufey’s cheekbones and frame with her features painted on top to plant the idea in my mind, though when you shift to your female form you lose all resemblance to her other than your coloration. That makes me think it was a spell rather than inheritance - I know for certain that form is all your own after all. I don’t know the truth and I never will, at least not this version of me. Korg and I went through the whole thing a few times when I was first coming to terms with it all. He’s a good listener like that, though he couldn’t really help beyond letting me figure out how messed up it all is and why I was drinking myself into a stupor instead of just getting angry and breaking things if someone asked me about it. If you end up on Sakkar while fighting Hela again you’ll meet him, but maybe that will just be someplace you can go after Thanos has been reduced to dust and you want to blow up a twisted slavery-based dictatorship for fun. The last living Valkyrie is there, and before things went from bad to intolerably horrific she’d been flirting with both you and Banner and waiting for one or the other of you to do something about it. It was looking like you would just before… well, before I watched you be strangled to death while laying helpless among the few dead and dying warriors who made it onto the Statesman.”

“This is all just so much… We can’t fight him.”

“We can and we do, and he dies while most of us live. He didn’t intend to destroy reality when he destroyed the stones - he only thought he was preventing them from being used by others to undo his hard work. He’s insane and thinks we would all flourish in the wake of the culling, but it was all pandemonium from the first moment. Even when we devised a way to get around him and bring everyone back, it is still a chaotic mess because now there are a bunch of people walking around who essentially skipped five years. Their loved ones moved on, their kids grew without them - it isn’t so bad for a longer-lived people like ourselves, but for most of the universe it is an unmitigated disaster. It wasn’t just people, it was plants and animals too. Where is the plenty and glut of resources to be had when half the livestock and grain is gone? It was madness - his madness that he infected you with. Get it out of your head as quick as you can, Loki, he doesn’t deserve to own any part of you.”

“You think that I have…” Loki’s snarl was cut off when a commotion started up. Rhythmic banging echoed down the hallway.

“That’s our cue!” Thor pulled himself up from the patch of floor he’d been sitting on since Loki denied him the use of his furniture in a (regrettably understandable) moment of contrariness. “I’ll drop the barriers for you as soon as the mob gets here.”

“You are actually trusting me with all of this?”

“In order to build trust, one must first give it. When it is broken, the responsibility to rebuild it lays on the side that did the breaking. You do know I didn’t throw you off the Bifrost, or has that false memory not faded?” A crash sounded as the first cell was smashed open.

“I, I don’t know. Some things are a jumble still.” Thor reached out and gripped Loki’s shoulder, as he had done countless other times.

“I did wrong you by believing Sif and the Warriors Three when they implied you had attacked Father and Mother to put yourself on the throne. I fought you rather than asking Mother, who I’d found in your arms safe and unharmed, for details. I grieved over that, after you let go, but it was Father who wronged you most so I can’t really apologize for those things that you most want satisfaction over. I can say I wish I could go back further and fix it all, but the invasion of Midgard had too many repercussions. The Time Stone refused me access to any time before you fell, and unless I was ready to accept Mother’s death as unavoidable this is as much time to heal from what happened to you that I could possibly give you.”

“I suppose I can’t possibly do any worse than dooming the universe to a slow and agonizing death via unchecked entropy.” Loki took a deep breath and turned to observe the first few prisoners that had come into view. The Kursed Elf was still a few cells down based on the sound of the cell walls failing.

“That’s the spirit!” Thor said with a smile. He swung Stormbreaker and took out the corner pillar. With a wave he disappeared in a flash of green that wasn’t quite the shade the brothers were used to. The two guards nearest the cell startled. They had up until a moment ago seen Loki laying on his bed tossing his cup into the air, the very picture of restless boredom.

“I’d love to help, but I have more important places to be,” Loki said as he lept over them and sprinted for the exit, five copies of him running off in different directions. This was going to be tricky, and there was still a bitter part of him that didn’t want to fix everyone's problems for the thousandth time when he probably won't be thanked for it, but it was much better than sitting in a cell for the next four millennia.


End file.
